Final website

Yay for all-nighters!

Enjoy,
Avery

Here is a site map of what my website will look like:

I'm basically going to look at how second life affects real life. First, I'm looking at how it affects relationships. Second, I'm looking at how corporations are being affected by second life. Third, I'm looking at individual stories from people who use second life. Last, I'm looking at how second life is affecting the medical field. If you want to look at any of the articles, you can go to the respective websites and search for it with the article name.

- Avery

After much deliberating, I decided to focus on our most recent aspect of study - Second Life. Personally I do not understand how someone could get so attached to something that is not physically real. To have a greater understanding, I searched for articles on how Second Life has affected the lives of real human beings. After looking through CNN, Time, and Fortune's websites, I found numerous articles on how Second Life affects people. I was surprised to see how many articles there were on the topic. It spanned from relationship issues to medical to economic related. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to break it down quite yet - maybe one page on relationships, one on medical, one on economy, and one on Second Life background. Each area would have three articles related to the topic. Even though I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to organize my thoughts, I've decided to built my website around the articles I found which concern how Second Life affects real life. What do you think?

Avery

Finding a website that utilized second level navigation well was harder than I imagined. It would start off well and then once you clicked on one link, there was not a link to bring you back. This created much confusion. One website that I found that did this well was hulu. They do an excellent job by incorporating their main link bar on every page while allowing to go deeper within each section.

An example of this can be seen when you click on "recently added." Even though it brings you to the new page with a break down of recently added videos, the main bar is still there to bring you back. Overall it is well organized which makes the viewer happy because he or she can naviagate easily without getting frustratingly lost. I hope my final project can be this well designed.

Avery

 After reading about the new technologies on CNN's website, I decided to create a website on four of the most interesting ones. Check it out on my new website!

Avery

While surfing the net, I came upon a website worth noting. Gamequarium is a website designed to be a forum for "fun" learning for kids and a tool for teachers. In some ways, it is very effective but when looking at the website design - it takes away from its effectiveness. From the color scheme to the flashing graphics, the website is very distracting even for a small child.

The first thing I noticed when I came to the site was the numerous floating bubbles. I couldn't help but look at them. The website needs to focus on getting the kids to click on the exercises instead of watching bubbles float. Next, the flashing pictures and moving banner caught my attention. Maybe a moving dog will make a child click on the picture and then have to do math exercises, but when considering the design - it takes away from the exercises. How can a child focus if there is movement all over the page? They can't. Next the color scheme seemed too bright and flashy. It made the text somewhat difficult to read and overall appeared thrown together. If I was a teacher and came upon this website, it would not seem like a credible source for me to get learning tools from.

An exceptional website that I found was the Houston Museum of Natural Science's website. This website comes off as very professional and catches your attention. With a gray background, the colorful photographs of the exhibits stand out and compel the viewer to find out more. My favorite part of the website is how simple yet very creative it is. From the outstanding pictures to the detailed descriptions of what the museum provides it is an ideal format for a website.

Some key aspects to note is the easy readable text. The creamy boxed text makes it stand out from the gray background. Also the fact that there is a picture with each new page is a great way to clearly illustrate what the museum contains. Plus all of the links are active and can easily bring you back to the homepage. But my all time favorite aspect is that there is a search bar at the top of every page, so that even after you think you've searched everywhere and can't find what you are looking for, you can type it in at the top and the site will search for your answer. Pretty handy if you ask me. Very informative yet still professional.

Avery

Here is my final website about Google. Wow, I learned a lot. Never using Google again. That is for sure.

Avery

Check out  how to survive in the 21st century!

Problems / Questions that I encountered along the way:
1. Trying to center my pictures without using the <CENTER> tag in my html but instead in my css.
2. Wrapping text around photos.
3. Signing into Fire FTP.

Answers:
1. Dr. Delwiche helped me out by wrapping the picture with a <DIV> tag!
2. Still don't know how to do this. I need to learn how though!
3. I forgot the www. in front of the account name. Oops!

Avery

Check out my mini website at:
www.resnet.trinity.edu/acallon/jetsons.html
Let me know what you think!

Avery